Juice-ly 23rd (Afternoon Edition): Halfway Home (Again)!

This guy sez, "Woooooooah - we're halfway there...!"

Day 23 – how crazy is this? When I did my 30-day fast in November I was but a week away from being all the way done after 23 days. Now? I have as long to go as I’ve been juicing. It doesn’t really feel like it has been an overly long fast, though. After going through a few days in a fog, and wondering if I could actually finish this thing at all, I’ve been sharp, alert, and full of energy these past few days. Yesterday, while I was hanging out with my kids in the morning, I just wanted to get projects done around the house. Little things, like cleaning out the air conditioning vent that happens to sit almost directly under my 1-year-old son’s high chair, which means that it had a couple of months of those organic puffs accumulated inside of it. Or replacing our worn-out patio umbrella with the new one my wife just bought. Little stuff like that, that I never have time to do because I’m always at the library, or at my desk writing papers, or at the library writing papers. I’m really enjoying this temporary dalliance with freedom, believe me!

Also had another non-scale victory yesterday. My daughter’s 5^th birthday is coming up this weekend, and she has requested that we cook hot dogs on the grill. I’m not going to eat them, but I will cook them for her. Anyway, keep in mind that I haven’t eaten anything with a mother or a face since mid-October, and I’m not a particularly creative chef. Which means that we haven’t used our gas grill in about 10 months. I wanted to fire it up to make sure we had enough propane, that no wild animals had built their nests in there, that I didn’t need to clean off any year-old meat residue, etc. So I did that yesterday and used a sweet potato as my test case. The idea of making fries on the grill has captured my imagination recently, but I didn’t want to make a huge batch, for obvious reasons. This time, I made an aluminum foil basket and sprayed it with a little bit of olive oil, then put them on the grill for about 20 minutes of indirect heat and 5 minutes of direct heat.

They looked and smelled like they had turned out pretty good! My wife tried a bit of one, and gave my kids some, but none of them seemed to want any more than they needed to eat to be polite to me. I did want to taste-test it myself, for a split second, but I didn’t. Just put the leftover slices in a Ziploc bag in the fridge. Maybe they’ll want them at some point, but even if they don’t, I won’t mind making them again when I finally eat solids.

Evidence that I finished the 15K in '09.

Non-scale victories are nice, but scale victories aren’t all that bad, either. I’m less than ten pounds away from that magical, fabulous place known as OneDerLand! I’ve only been anywhere close to this weight one other time in my adult life. I was about a pound and a half lighter than this for like a week in 2008, just after I got married. My wife and I held each other accountable, worked out together, ate together, and trained for a 15K race together. Although even before that I had been slowly slacking on my eating and workout habits. We made homemade, relatively healthy pizza on Friday nights as our “cheat” meal every week. We had received a pizza stone as a wedding gift and were putting it to good use. We experimented with all kinds of toppings and sauces, but one of the last nights we hit a big stinker when we tried to make a Thai pizza with peanut sauce. Let’s just say that our sauce was waaay too much like peanut butter and not even close to Thai. It tasted like eating a giant peanut butter sandwich! That episode itself was actually pretty funny in hindsight, but after that we quietly, simultaneously started to slack off on our eating and workout habits. I was training regularly for the race but eating so relatively poorly that I could barely maintain my weight around 230. Remember, this is up from the mid-200s at my most fit.

This thing did not stand a chance against my post-race binge.

We finished the race and decided to celebrate our accomplishment in probably the most destructive way possible: by eating a meal at Outback. I remember almost finishing a whole Bloomin’ Onion by myself, and the rest of the meal just went downhill from there. I guess that at that point I decided that I was good enough, and abandoned the workout and eating habits that had gotten me as healthy as I was, in favor of gluttony and sloth. Not surprisingly, I had packed on about 75 pounds only a few short months later. It took me about two and a half more years to discover FSND – but that is another story, for another blog post.